What can be said about such an artist? His fellow student Simon Cutts provides us a comprehensive insight into Stephen Skidmore´s pictorial inventions: since almost 40 years the artist has lived and worked in a tiny apartment in London. In the first years he painted with gouache and acrylic, then started to use oil. Small sized paintings. In the early days, his landlady told him he couldn´t have pictures on the wall, so he kept them under his bed. Now it is too late for that.

From his living-bedroom at Avenue Crescent in Acton, West London, - renamed due to tenancy law into ‚studio apartment’ – he painted looking through the rain on the window melancholic blurred street scenes, Rain Paintings. Now the same contemplating, blue view is captured by defoliated trees over the roof ridges, expecting the upcoming spring.

We will present the latest works Window Paintings from 2012/13, a series of 18 paintings, created within two years. A glance at the world outside the artist´s comfort zone, reduced to black and white.
As Baudelaire wrote: „To create a template, that is genius“.

Ken Lum combines photographic images and texts, language and sculptural elements in order to question class affiliation and ethnic diversity in Western society, as well as the presentation of individuality within a socially and economically coded urban space. For Karlsplatz he developed a new billboard in which moments of normativity and difference meet in the marketing language of public policies.

Poets and artists express a view of the world as a collage of passing fragments.
There is no bigger picture or a linear logic here, only transitory images and words,
seen as if rushing past the windows of a train.
(Ugo Rondinone)

Ugo Rondinone is not only one of the most successful Swiss artists today; in recent years, he has also made a name for himself as a curator, whereby he understands his curatorial projects primarily as an extension of his artistic practice. Secession, as an artist-run institution, has a particular interest in spotlighting the various facets and possibilities of artists working in the contemporary art world. In the wake of his recent curated exhibitions the third mind (Palais de Tokyo, Paris, 2007) and the spirit level (Gladstone Gallery, New York, 2011), Rondinone was thus invited to realize a large-scale exhibition at Secession as an artist-curator in 2015. He has conceived the exhibition Artists and Poets, based on the two previous shows, as the final part of a trilogy on art and poetry that reflects his affinity to literature and poetry, something that is also evident in his own work.

By combining the terms “artist” and “poet” with self-evidence, Rondinone emphasizes the shared aspects of these two fields of artistic activity, borne by the conviction that that art, be it in the form of a poem a sculpture or a painting, can have an effect on the human being. For the Vienna exhibition, he chose artists that are so different from one another, that it is unlikely that they would otherwise be presented together in a joint show, without Rondinone as driving force behind it.

In his exhibition Künstler und Dichter, Rondinone also refers to the local context: from 1986 to 1990 he studied at Vienna's Hochschule für angewandte Kunst and thus has a special relationship to the city. For example, the work Dial-A-Poem by the American performance artist and poet John Giorno will be adapted to the local context presenting works by German language poets. Towards this end, Secession will cooperate with Vienna's Schule für Dichtung, which will curate the content.

The exhibition will be accompanied by an artist book conceived by Ugo Rondinone.

Ugo Rondinone was born in 1964 in Brunnen, Switzerland. He lives and works in New York.